An enterprise call system or a call center may receive thousands of calls within a given day. The calls may be received at a plurality of distributed locations. Each call to such a location or destination requires a certain amount of bandwidth from the network that carries the call. However, network bandwidth is often constrained in one or more communication links. Accordingly, with each call, a system or component in the network must determine whether there is enough unused or available bandwidth to handle each call.
Several arrangements known in the art facilitate the allocation or distribution of bandwidth. More particularly, various methods and devices have been developed that facilitate the management of a communication link having constrained bandwidth. In some arrangements, a central system maintains a calculation or estimate for the amount of bandwidth available on a given communication link. As each call controller receives a request for a new call, the call controller queries the central system whether sufficient bandwidth exists on a particular communication link to proceed with the phone call. As will be appreciated, such a centralized approach bears numerous disadvantages compared to a decentralized method. By way of example, as the network becomes more diverse with several call controllers and multiple communication links, the process of requesting bandwidth information for each link from the central system becomes inefficient and creates excessive network traffic. In addition, should the central system become disabled or unavailable, no other component in the network can determine whether the desired bandwidth is available. Still further, scalability problems may accrue when the system or network becomes large.